


Dealing With Fear

by yueinya



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Blood, M/M, Other, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:55:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8882479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yueinya/pseuds/yueinya
Summary: Loving his best friend was easy for Bart. Jaime was warm and kind and handsome and just all around pretty crash. But this? This was different, so he ran.





	

He should have _known_ this would happen. How he would have known that was still a mystery, even to him as his feet hammered against hard packed dirt of the Texas desert beneath his sneakers, but still he should have _known_. Damn it! He couldn’t even hear the wind whizzing past his head as he sped onward. No. No this couldn’t be happening. The fear was almost as strong as the pull of the wind, gripping and pulling at his clothes and hair and skin as he zipped along. His heartbeat wasn’t nearly as fast as his footsteps, but just as hard and anxious. This couldn’t be happening and no way was he just _letting it_ happen. But that’s what he’d been doing. He’d been sitting there, watching, waiting. Completely content and complacent to his emotions as they betrayed everything he’d ever known. 

Fear was what he’d known. His entire life he’d known fear. _Keep your head down, keep walking, do not talk back, do not look up, do not ask questions_. That was how you stayed alive. You moved things for the Reach, with their sentinels of contrasting colors there to put anyone back in line that they saw fit, even when that person was a 12-year-old kid carrying a box he could barely lift. Red, Green, Blue, Black—it didn’t matter. They were all the Reach. 

Bart closed his eyes against the wind and ran faster, ran harder. He felt the rush of air around him, trying to slow him down. He pressed on and heard the _BOOM_ of the sound barrier as he broke through it. Faster than the speed of sound. Good thing he’d carried his ear cuffs, that boom might have burst his eardrums otherwise. Maybe. He didn’t really know. He didn’t really care now as he tried to push the voices out of his head. 

“ _Get up, slave! Do not make me say it again!_ ” He shook his head. No. That wasn’t Jaime. That wasn’t them. It couldn’t be. 

But it was. At least, technically. No matter how well Bart could separate the two, disassociate them in his mind, it was always there.

“Faster, Bart.” He muttered to himself as though he could run away from his fear. As though he could run away from his thoughts, feelings and memories. It wouldn’t work, it never did. Tears stung at his eyes and his breathing became more shallow. He couldn’t see, so he closed his eyes again and tried to focus on breathing. In, out, in, out. _Calm down_. He hated anxiety attacks. And he lost his footing, falling forward into the desert ground. He slammed into the dirt on his side, flipping and rolling as he tumbled down a slope and into a small clearing. Short cliffs rose around him in a half-circle shape which he barely noticed as he skidded to a stop and felt his back smack into a rock. He groaned, eyes closed tight against the pain, his muscles contracting as he rolled onto his stomach. His whole body ached for a minute and his side burned. He didn’t move for a while, just folded his arms together to prop up his head as he laid in the silence of the desert. Surely there would be a snake, scorpion, spider or something of the like creeping towards him in the darkness, but he couldn’t find the energy to care. He was only out in the middle of the desert because he was such a damn chicken. 

All his life the Blue Beetle was synonymous with evil in his mind. He had come back to stop the possibility of Blue Beetle from betraying humanity and bringing on the Reach Apocalypse. He had come to the past with the full intention of stopping him at any means necessary. But then he met Jaime. Beautiful, kind, funny Jaime and suddenly killing him (which had definitely been an option before) was off the table. Bart couldn’t even fathom trying to kill his _best friend_. But the Scarab? The Scarab was still an option. And then they had tried to remove it from Jaime and it had hurt him and nanites had attacked Bumble Bee and the Atom. And suddenly killing either of them became not an option anymore. 

But befriending them and not wanting them dead was different than… than this. Nothing could have prepared him for this. 

He’d known he liked Jaime way more than just a friend for a while at this point, which was probably obvious thanks to his inability to not flirt and not be awkward around the older teen. The whole team knew, and he was sure Jaime did too and was just too nice to tell him to knock off the flirting or blatantly tell him “Hey, you’re three years younger than me and that’s a little weird and I don’t like you that way,” which would have been a surefire way to get Bart to at least try _harder_ to back off. But Jaime hadn’t shown any real distaste for Bart’s horrible but persistent flirting. While the younger of the two _tried_ to tone it down, he really didn’t give it his full effort. So, because of no real backlash, that flirting had been going on for a while now. 

A few years, to be exact. Over the course of those handful of years, Jaime had seemed to become way more comfortable with Bart and with the Scarab on his spine. Maybe Jaime became more comfortable with him because after the Reach apocalypse disaster had been averted Bart had made it a point to let Jaime know that he didn’t blame him for the apocalyptic time that Bart had come from. It wasn’t his fault, it was the Reach’s. He also made it known that he knew the Scarab was more sentient than the rest of the team seemed to think it was. 

After that, Jaime had started to relax. As the years went on Bart noticed subtle changes in Jaime’s stance and speech patterns from time to time. He didn’t really question it much at first and brushed it off, but then Jaime told him that was the Scarab, Khaji Da. Bart hadn’t really been afraid whenever Khaji Da would slip into control to comment on something, and in fact he kind of liked it because _who else did Khaji Da talk to besides Jaime?_ But he would unwillingly tense up and go right on alert whenever he was speaking with Khaji Da directly instead of Jaime. Maybe it was the fact that while Bart knew that Khaji Da and Jaime were NOT the same Blue Beetle he’d grown up being afraid of, the sudden change to something more akin to the way the latter had behaved would put him on edge. 

Now he was 16 and Jaime was 19 and of course he’d been hardcore crushing on the guy for almost 3 years now, and he knew Jaime knew it. But liking Jaime was different than this. Liking _Jaime_ was easy and simple because Jaime was warm and caring and funny and didn’t think Bart was annoying (or at least never let Bart think that he thought he was annoying, which was more important really). 

But that was not what had caused Bart to suddenly pick up and leave Jaime’s house in El Paso in the middle of the movie they’d been watching. The reason Bart had gotten up, muttered some lame excuse and then proceeded to bolt from the room was that as they’d sat there, silence hovering in the dark air between them as the bad slasher flick Bart had picked out played on the television, the young speedster had realized something. He had a bowl of popcorn on his lap and was munching as quietly as possible. He saw Jaime’s posture change ever so slightly from the corner of his eye, and the tone in his voice was different when he spoke up. 

“That is not how a leg looks when it is broken.” Bart had snorted a little at the comment, throwing a piece of popcorn at him without really thinking about it. Khaji Da’s eyes had turned toward him and he raised an eyebrow slowly, and then tossed the popcorn back at him. 

It hit Bart right between the eyes. 

An amused smile pulled at Khaji Da’s lips and Bart found himself thinking _“Wow, I really like that smile.”_ He immediately assumed it was because it was Jaime and of course he liked that smile because _he liked Jaime_. But then he thought _“Jaime doesn’t usually smile like that, though.”_ Of course, he was right because it wasn’t Jaime smiling it was Khaji Da and basically that was when it sort of clicked for him. He snapped his gaze back to the TV to try and ignore it, but his mind was already racing and when Bart’s mind latched onto an idea it did not stop. How could he not have realized it? For almost a year he’d been slowly becoming more accustomed to Khaji Da nudging his way into control of Jaime’s body to comment on something. 

At some point, after a few months, his guard had dropped. Seeing Khaji Da in control of Jaime’s body no longer put Bart on edge. He no longer put up his guard against the Scarab and really liked his comments. Bart had a dark sense of humor from time to time and whether he wanted to admit it or not it would occasionally line up with Khaji Da’s comments. During the time spent with the person he had come to the past to destroy, Bart had found himself liking him more and more. And of course, he wouldn’t admit it to himself because Khaji Da was, technically, the person that had tormented and terrified him his entire life.  
But at the same time he wasn’t. 

“Dried blood isn’t that color.” Bart muttered, popping another piece of popcorn into his mouth. 

“Fresh blood is not even that color.” Khaji Da replied. 

“Think it’s like half-dried?” Bart asked, his eyes flicking back to his friend. Were they friends? Good question. 

“Maybe. It still would not look like that.” 

“Movie magic, ladies and gentleman. And Scarabs.” Green eyes focused on the TV again and Bart thought he heard Khaji Da snicker. Maybe it was Jaime. Maybe it was both. 

And then Bart noticed his gaze shifting over to Jaime/Khaji Da because honestly he was so distracted by his own mind racing through all the reasons he should and shouldn’t like the Scarab and Jaime both that he couldn’t really notice the change of posture if it had happened or not. The movie was about half way over when he stood up and put the popcorn down. “I, uh, I just remembered I was supposed to help Iris with the kids and um. I’ll see you later.” He didn’t give Jaime or Khaji Da time to question or object, he bolted to the door and the second he was outside he’d taken off. He needed air. He needed to run. He needed to think. 

Well a whole lot of good that had done him because now he was in the desert, by himself, his face barely an inch from the ground as he lay there in the dirt. The white of his t-shirt was stained reddish with the dust and dirt and maybe blood, he couldn’t really tell if he was bleeding. He was breathing, but not very well, and he’d had his eyes squeezed shut pretty hard for a while as he tried to calm down. 

“Crap.” He muttered as he pushed himself to his feet once the burning of his muscles had subsided. He looked around, trying to get his bearings. Where was he? He started to walk back, slowly. Slow for a normal person, let alone for him. He checked his side as he walked and luckily, he’d only gotten covered in scratches. It looked almost like road rash. Still, way better than it could have been. He got himself to the top of the alcove he’d fallen into and looked around. The corner of his goggles were cracked, which was not good because he couldn’t run as fast as he wanted. How far had he gone? Was he even in Texas anymore? He would have checked his phone, but it was still laying on the coffee table at Jaime’s place. Judging by the skid marks in the dirt, he at least knew what direction he’d come from. He started back that way, at least he could find a zeta or his way home from El Paso. He took off, slower than before. Much slower. It would give him time to think.

The Blue Beetle was no longer synonymous with evil in his mind. Slowly but surely, Jaime and Khaji Da had changed that. So why was he so scared?


End file.
